In some sad news, it seems as though EA is going to be closing the doors at Visceral Games, the developer best known for the Dead Space franchise. Visceral was also working on an untitled Star Wars project, which is now expected to change directions and be assigned a new team.
“Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe,” said Patrick Soderlund, executive VP of EA worldwide studios, in a post on EA’s website. “In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design.”
The Star Wars game will now be taken over by EA Vancouver, who had already been working on the title with Visceral.
If there’s any silver lining out of this, it’s that EA appears to be trying to relocate staff onto other projects throughout their catalogue, rather than lay them off entirely. The post explains this by saying EA is in “the midst of shifting as many of the team as possible to other projects and teams at EA.”
We hope everyone lands on their feet.
(Thanks, Gamespot.)
